Old Fire: After the fires came the rain — and more tragedy

Just months after the Old Fire was out, on Christmas Day, a storm rolled through the Inland Empire. It led to a flash flood in Waterman Canyon that killed 14 people at St. Sophia Camp. A front-end loader works to clear a mud slide across Lytle Creek Road, after a pickup truck became trapped in the slide Christmas 2003 in Lytle Creek.
STAFF FILE PHOTO

It was two months to the day after the Old Fire charred areas in the San Bernardino mountains and foothills that torrential rain caused disastrous mudslides in the same area, killing more than a dozen people.

The community, which was just starting to recover from the 2003 blaze that burned more than 91,000 acres, destroyed more than 1,000 structures and cost nearly $38 million, was exhausted.

“It was kind of the perfect storm. Everything going bad at one time,” said Jim Lyon, a Big Bear resident who was serving as a search-and-rescue volunteer at the time.

Lyon, now 76, remembers it well.

It was 3:30 p.m. on Christmas Day and he was just sitting down for the holiday dinner when the pagers went off, alerting officials and volunteers that they were needed at three locations following the flooding.

Fourteen people died at the St. Sophia Camp in Waterman Canyon. Just a few miles to the west, two people died in a mudslide at the KOA Kampground in Devore. Lytle Creek also flooded, but there were no fatalities.

Lyon responded to the church camp, where water and mud swept through.

“I remember running across nothing more than a left hand coming out of the mud, with this big, gold wedding ring on the left finger,” Lyon said, tearing up. “I realized this was the father of a family that had all died. It was really tragic. I’ll never forget that.”

Lyon said they would search for hours until volunteers were forced to take a break.

Fresh team members replaced tired ones around the clock. Every day, after coming off a shift, personnel would have to talk to a chaplain about what they saw and experienced.

“That was such a big help to me,” said Lyon, a former captain with Bear Valley Search and Rescue. “I would come out so emotionally upset.”

“There is a feeling of elation when you find someone alive and bring them back to their families, it reinforces that what you’re doing is good,” Lyon said. “But there was nothing we could have done to find someone alive. We did all we could that day.”

“I felt prepared going in, but you can’t train for something like this.”

Between 160 and 200 firefighters and rescuers were involved in the search. Rescue personnel came from the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, the San Bernardino County, Ontario, Montebello and Rialto fire departments, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, the state Office of Emergency Services and the U.S. Forest Service.

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Pat Burns, a volunteer for the San Bernardino Mountain Search and Rescue team, said the flooding was a result of the fire.

“The whole area was totally burned off and there was no soil retention,” he said.

Debris built up in catch basins wouldn’t allow water through, Burns said. Then, when it finally broke, a wall of water came down.

The area was destroyed and homes were ripped in half, said Mike Ward, outgoing director for the Search and Rescue counsel in the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department.

“Half was prestene and untouched, the other was crushed by boulders,” he said about the structures, “Huge boulders, huge trees were thrown about like marbles and toothpicks.”

During the rescue efforts, it took a long time to go a short distance, Ward said, There was a roaring river full of debris. Lumber and car parts were strewn around. Metal guard rails were wrapped around trees.

Meryle Moroney had just moved into her home on Old Waterman Canyon Road two months earlier when the Old Fire swept through the San Bernardino Mountains, charring the side of her residence.

Then the Christmas Day floods came, filling the creek that runs beside her home with 30 feet of mud and debris from the burned mountainside.

“You could smell the ash in it,” she said. “It was dark black and there were giant trees and boulders floating down. It was crazy,” the 55-year-old said.

It took out her neighbor’s bridge, and filled another home with two feet of mud and trees.

When she called emergency personnel to tell them that residents in her neighborhood were being hit by a mudslide, they told her their hands were full with a more horrifying situation farther north.

People were gathered at St. Sophia Camp that afternoon when the mudslide came through, killing 14 people. Among the victims were camp caretaker Jorge Monzon, his wife and children, including his 8-month-old son.

The search for the victims stretched for months, until searchers eventually found the final victim, a 12-year-old boy, as far away as Colton.

During those weeks, Moroney said members of the boy’s family never gave up hope that they would eventually find him.

“His family came every weekend with shovels, looking for him. It was heartbreaking,” she said.

It was a case that made its way to the courts when relatives of the victims sued St. Sophia Greek Orthodox Church, which operated the camp. St. Sophia settled with the victims for $13 million. A superior court judge also found that Caltrans was partially responsible for the mudslide.

Moroney said structures at the camp have since been bulldozed and removed because of problems with children playing with paintball guns on the property.